Bitcoin Price Peaks Above $8,500 for the First Time in History

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Everyone knew it was only a matter of time until the Bitcoin price reached a new all-time high. The year 2017 has been incredibly bullish for the world’s leading cryptocurrency, and the party is far from over. Despite some massive push-back the past few days, we now have a Bitcoin price of just over US$8,500. That’s a remarkable milestone for a currency so many people have willingly ignored to this very day.

ANOTHER ALL-TIME HIGH BITCOIN PRICE

With its numerous all-time highs, the Bitcoin price continues to amaze a lot of people. This is only to be expected, as the world’s leading cryptocurrency has been flexing its muscles all year long. Whereas financial moguls such as Jamie Dimon may doubt the potential of Bitcoin, the rest of the world seemingly disagrees. Surpassing US$8,500 for the first time in history is a remarkable feat, especially for a currency that isn’t even ten years old.

It is not the first all-time high Bitcoin has seen in Q4 of 2017 either, as its momentum turned even more bullish last month. At the time, one Bitcoin was barely worth US$4,500, which was a whopping 450% increase from January of this year. In October, few people assumed we would surpass US$6,000, let alone reach US$8,500 before the year was over. It is evident there is no stopping Bitcoin right now from reaching that magical US$10,000 mark, although it will not be easy by any means.

Considering Bitcoin’s rise over the past few months, it will be interesting to see how things play out when Christmas comes around. A lot of people will convert small amounts of Bitcoin to fiat for spending purposes. However, the dip may not be as steep as most people would like to see either. There is a lot of bullish momentum left in the Bitcoin markets, as this latest all-time high materialized after struggling to maintain the US$8,000 level these past few days.

This week the bitcoin software startup Chainside released a new Python 3 Segwit-compliant Bitcoin library called “BTCpy.” The company hopes the new codebase will further blockchain development and that businesses can integrate Bitcoin software with ease.

Introducing BTCpy – a New Python 3 Segwit Compliant Bitcoin Library

Chainside is blockchain protocol company that specializes in bitcoin development for businesses looking to integrate the digital currency into their daily operations. On September 3 the startup launched BTCpy which aims to provide a “simple interface to parse and create complex Bitcoin scripts.”

“Differently from other existent Bitcoin libraries, BTCpy is able to recognise and create arbitrary scripts in a simple fashion, something particularly important to develop Layer 2 applications, where complex smart contracts with time-locks, hash-locks and if-else clauses are needed,” explains Chainside’s CTO Simone Bronzini.

The BTCpy codebase developed by Chainside using Python 3.

‘Tools Like BTCpy to Abstract Complexity Are Needed’

Bronzini says that during the scaling debate some proponents prefer to keep Bitcoin software simple but solutions like Segwit and Lightning Network can be complicated processes. “We believe that for the long term success of Bitcoin the best technical solution is always preferable, but tools like BTCpy to abstract its complexity are needed,” Bronzini’s announcement details.

Further the startup says while others keep libraries like this private for company use only Chainside felt the best thing to do was to release the codebase to the open source community. The codebase and protocol instructions can be found here on Github and the software is in its very early stages. Presently it is highly discouraged to use it in a production environment explains Chainside.

Chainside still has to add support for Segwit addresses (BIP173), deploy caching to segwit digest computation to avoid quadratic hashing, and many other improvements mentioned in the team’s roadmap.

What do you think about BTCpy? Do you think libraries like this one is helpful for development? Let us know in the comments below.

With over US$4.32 billion in 24-hour trading volume, the global demand for BTC should not be underestimated whatsoever. It is pretty interesting to see this massive amount of trading volume for Bitcoin right now, as we started the year with around US$1 billion in daily volume. At the time, that was considered a major milestone, but things have certainly evolved in a nice direction ever since. It may only be a matter of time before US$5 billion per day is the new normal, but it is still too early to say that for sure.

Bitfinex is still destroying most other exchanges in terms of Bitcoin trading volume. Its USD and ETH markets are both generating six-figure numbers, with the USD market clearly in the lead. Bithumb is in second place again, which is good to see. There is also a massive amount of ETH volume emanating from Poloniex, as people are seemingly cashing out their Ethereum profits and buying Bitcoin. At the same time, the Ethereum price isn’t budging all that much either, which may create an interesting paradigm moving forward.

How all of this will play out in the long run remains to be seen. With the Bitcoin price over US$8,500 – at least temporarily – the future is looking incredibly bright. At the same time, a higher price will inevitably lead to even more market volatility, which may spell trouble up ahead. This is an interesting time to be involved with cryptocurrency, regardless of how much one’s portfolio is worth. This is only the beginning of what is yet to come for Bitcoin and those altcoins which have actual potential.